


warped

by Anonymous



Category: New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Character Study, Childhood Sexual Abuse, Gen, Incest, No Dialogue, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-15
Updated: 2018-08-15
Packaged: 2019-06-28 00:31:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15696522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Tsumugi Shirogane, and the struggle to make sense of things





	warped

**Author's Note:**

> Or, "I take canon's love hotel scene and Korekiyo's backstory and actually give it a reason that makes sense, especially when you consider the behaviors seen in survivors of long-term and intense abuse." And, uh, happy birthday Tsumugi? I love you? I'm sorry that everything I touch turns to hell? Just, you know. This is how it is sometimes.

She finds the doujins when she’s twelve, eleven maybe, and she hoards them like the end of the world is coming and the only thing that will keep her safe from the zombie hoards are downloaded images of someone else’s scans of a book that they stole. Not because Tsumugi particularly likes them—they’re nicely drawn, but obscenely out of character—but because she needs them. They’re a way into a world that she understands so much of but doesn’t understand a single bit, and Tsumugi needs to understand it all the way through. It’s part of growing up, she figures, and she’s always been remarkably mature and ahead on her studies. Everyone’s always said so. Her sexual education should be no exception to the rule. 

(Tsumugi studies hard, but she can’t make the connection between love and sex. They’re always saying that they love each other, whichever ships are involved, but Tsumugi can’t connect the idea of true love with what happened to her, what happens to her. Maybe she just needs more time with them, to read them a little more. Time can fix everything.)

***

The tropes start to make sense after a few weeks. She can tap her foot to the thin plots that are just an excuse for sex, and she can normally find the rhythm of those parts, too. Sometimes Tsumugi likes them and sometimes they disgust her and sometimes she feels nothing about them at all, and she can’t make a connection between which content makes which reaction. It’s hard. All of this is hard, but something compels her to do it. It’s like Tsumugi doesn’t even has a choice in it. 

(Tsumugi doesn’t feel like she has a choice in anything.)

***

A lot of them are about incest, and those are the ones she gravitates towards. They tend to be a little angstier, more plot-heavy, better written. Sometimes the pretense is coercion or forbidden love or just straight up sexual assault, and Tsumugi takes apart her situation piece by piece and tries to figure out which of the three it is.

She comes to the conclusion that it lays somewhere in the middle of all of them. Objectively, Tsumugi knows she loves him very much. He gives her gifts whenever he goes to the store and lets her watch Dangan Ronpa whenever her mom isn’t home and taught her how to throw a baseball so that her classmates would stop teasing her in gym class. But also she never liked what happened, what happens, she fought the first few times (or at least she thinks so—the first times are hazy and distant and mostly unremembered), she doesn’t think she likes it now and she doesn’t think the way she loves him is the way people are supposed to love their lovers at all. But also she’s always talked into complying, laying still and limp and letting him have his way with her. So it’s a little bit of everything, which she finds annoying. Tsumugi would much rather like a nice box to fit it into instead. 

Maybe if she was more like the girls in the doujins, she’d like it more. Tsumugi’s a cosplayer by nature and she’s pretty good at it when she goes to conventions, so she plays at cosplaying a few of her favorites. She doesn’t make an actual costume or anything—she wouldn’t waste good fabric on that—but she styles her hair and picks things from her wardrobe that her favorites would wear and then tries to act like how she saw them act. She wiggles her hips and claws at his back and makes sounds like an animal in a trap, but it’s not alluring or sexy or fun. Her limbs are gangly, awkward, sharp. Her hair comes undone in places and it’s stiff and smells like hairspray and sweat. Her makeup is running. 

(He puts a hand over her mouth when someone walks by the door. Tsumugi’s instinct is to bite down, but she sucks on his fingers instead. She saw that once, and it seems to work. 

Somehow, she doesn’t feel happy about it.) 

***

This is normal. This is normal. Everyone has something like this. Everyone is secretly just like him. They all have their things. Tusmugi is just his thing. Not even his only thing. She passes men on the street and says _You are just like him, you are just like him, you are just like him_. 

Maybe another man is what she needs, a different one. Maybe she just hasn’t found her fit. But she doesn’t really know how to seduce them, just how to be seduced. Tsumugi hikes up her skirt and makes coy, flirty expressions, but nothing ever comes of it. Her face is too plain for that sort of thing. She isn’t pretty enough for that to work. 

She is disappointed.

(She is relieved.)

***

Tsumugi is good at making jokes about it, at making headcanons about it, at drawing from her own experience to make them better and more accurate. She’s good at acting like it never happened to her. It’s not even really routine anymore. It’s more random, especially since Tsumugi started working on the Dangan Ronpa design crew, and being away from it is nice. It’s fantastic. It’s her dream job. Tsumugi has everything she could ever want. 

(Except she can’t sleep on her right side. She can never fall back asleep if someone wakes her up by walking by her room. She never likes being alone with men, especially ones with dark hair. She sleeps in odd, fractured segments and holes up in Tokyo and never, ever wants to go home. 

Tsumugi doesn't tell anyone why she doesn't want to go. No one asks.)

***

The best thing about being a Dangan Ronpa contestant is that they wipe her memory. For a few weeks, she forgets all of it. And then she survives and becomes the mastermind and they give it all back to her without asking if she wants it. They must know what she remembers. The must know. 

(They let him come to see her anyways. Tsumugi doesn’t even waste the breath on screaming.)

***

She gives Korekiyo the sort of backstory she wishes she had when it comes to the whole thing. It was going to be one of them, and she chose him. Tsumugi feels bad about doing it, but she does it. It’s not like anyone ever felt bad about doing it to her, so she doesn’t waste too much energy on it. She has more important things to do. 

(The best part about being in charge and having more important things to do is that she can request that no one see her, that she’s too busy. And finally, they listen, but not in the way Tsumugi wanted back when it all started. 

But it doesn’t matter. No one’s ever been too concerned with what Tsumugi wanted, and that won’t truly change until her game starts. Then, everyone will care, and it will be _perfect_.)


End file.
